Circle of Power

Is there something wrong with me — is it really that noticeable that I didn't shower today, or yesterday? I don't think so, because I tried really hard to smell me, and I can't at all, so I know it's not bothering you that much.

It begins innocently, with a conversation. I'll politely tell this new acquaintance a joke. A good one, usually. He'll laugh, always, and I'll politely chortle along to acknowledge the humor of the joke. Things are going well at this point. The skies are endless and blue, and social butterfly wings can be seen splitting out of my back like feathers in Black Swan. What could go wrong!, I foolishly ask, and I launch into another joke, certain to forge forever this new friendship in the fires of humor.

Suddenly, from the distance, a friend, Mike, approaches with wild reckless speed. He's heading right for my conversation. My conversation. No, I think to myself. Not this time. Coolly I turn my body 90 degrees in an attempt to box out this social wannabe. At this point, I am willing to make a certain sacrifice to protect my social stability, a sacrifice that involves acknowledging the inexplicable way I've turned my current conversation into what can best be described as a right angle of people. My back to Mike, I smile awkwardly at my dear acquaintance and pray that my realignment has caused a gravitational deflection of Mike's oncoming trajectory.

It's no use. In a brilliant maneuver, Mike swings wide around my defending body and enters the conversation from the opposite side. He makes a joke of his very own. What a stupid joke you moron, but what's this? My acquaintance laughs and turns his attention to him! O, bitter betrayal! Terrified, I jerk my head left and then right, surveying the room. My acquaintance has laughed too loud. A few heads have turned and spotted my threesome. A few bored people saunter over. Now there are enemies coming from all directions. It's all over now, I know. Nevertheless, I'm not giving up yet. I will fight to the god damn death.

With each new person added to the small mob, I try to chip in at the conversation with little witticisms to make my presence known. Everyone totally saw that I was here first, anyway. Again, it's no use. My fruitless desperation slowly gives way to the imminent circle that begins to form and tighten. I start to feel constricted on both sides. My arms are pressed against my sides, and the intense wave of body head shoots my temperature through the ceiling. Voices bounce and reflect back and forth across the walls of the circle, pounding at my small body and beating it backwards, until finally, here I am in my usual position, standing behind the little crack between Mike and Steve. Steve isn't that tall, so I can sort of crane my neck over his shoulder and peer in at the ensuing fun that seems to be going on in a world outside my own. I have fallen. My ego, once stroked, has been reduced to fluttering each time I succeed in eye contact with someone from The Group. I don't quite make out everything they're saying, because the music's kind of loud in here, but I don't really dislike Katy Perry, anyway. Whenever Mike or Steve talk, though, I hear their words easily, and I feel vicariously as if I'm a part of their words, as if in some small way, my presence has some bearing on the wind of influence that blows into them from behind. My acquaintance looks at me from across the way, and I yearn for some kind of acknowledgment, some hint that he knows things were simpler once, more beautiful. There is no spark in his eyes, though, and I can only guess that he's already forgotten my name. I shrink back, hesitantly, and I make one meek and final push toward the circle, but there's no give between Mike and Steve. The Group has everyone it needs. And I am alone. I remember the joke I told just five minutes prior, and I chuckle quietly to myself. Yes, it was a good one. I tell it again in my head. Yes, very good.

Living the Dream

The morning came, and everything was as it was before, and I remembered everything but it didn’t feel real, and it didn’t seem to affect me at all. It was as if the last night, however long it was, hadn’t happened.

A headache pounded my skull like a machine, and I crawled out of bed and ached my way downstairs toward sweet Aspirin. I felt weird. Or I felt normal, and that felt weird, because I didn’t want to feel normal. I wanted my life to be different, and it wasn’t. I wanted to be enlightened, or full of wisdom, or to know and see the same things I did before, but I couldn’t. It was all gone.

I didn’t know what time it was; my watch wasn’t on my wrist. I didn’t remember where it was. At the foot of the stairs, I stopped for a moment, and I tilted my head a bit and saw the panorama of strange pictures on the walls. This wasn’t my house. This was Sophie’s house. I let out a quiet chuckle at the insanity that I could come this far without recognizing I wasn’t where I expected. It was weird how that could happen.

Sophie’s parents weren’t home, and I fixed myself some breakfast in her kitchen, or rather, poured myself some cereal with milk, and I couldn’t find the spoons, so I just held the bowl up to my mouth and drank and ate at the same time. The cereal tasted like cereal, and the walls looked like walls, and the table felt smooth like a table, and the very quietness of the house sounded like silence, and it was all very muddling to me for the reasons already stated. I wondered why the cereal didn’t taste like rock and roll on my tongue, and why the walls didn’t sound like soft velvet in my ears. It was all very much the customary way, and that was troubling. I lifted the cereal bowl high into the air above my head and let it drop, and it shattered loudly and violently on the tile floor, and all I felt was remorse for having broken her thing and soiling her floor, and I was only mad at myself as I knelt and removed the stain that really looked like it almost belonged in the unkempt house, which was really more of a shed than a house. Sophie’s parents were mostly like her, I figured, using things only as they needed them and not spending too much of themselves on the sensitive and nostalgic.

I put the normal broken bowl into the normal trash can and opened the normal door into the open world, and I walked out, and there were no epiphanies to be found that morning in the chirping of the robins or in the arms of the bright sunlight, except maybe in the lack thereof, which wasn’t very satisfying at all. Sophie didn’t live that near to me, and the long walk back home was long, and I felt every minute of it, no more and no less of it.

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Hey, guys. It's, uh...been a while since we've talked. It's been about a few months. About a summer, really. I've been busy, you know, just like you. Well, not busy at all, really, which has allowed me to be really very busy. You know, I've had a couple of jobs, but they didn't work too terribly many hours. I took a French class, but that was a joke. Other than my roommates, there wasn't even a full handful of people I knew living in my town. So I uh...wrote a novel! That was an excerpt up there in italics. Do you like it? I like it. It's from chapter 16. There are 28 chapters. It's pretty long. It's 161 pages in Word, which by my best guess might be somewhere a little over 200 pages of a novely book. Yeah, I don't know. I pretty much spent most of all my days this summer either researching or writing it. Six months ago, I never could have imagined I could have done something like this if I hadn't been confronted with a sudden and absolutely vacant summer to do it with. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of tired, but I'm really pretty proud of it, besides the parts of me that are less proud of it. I've been working since the end of May, basically. As a reference point, a couple days before this many posts ago on Classic Brian. I finished Friday, so I guess it took me less than 100 days of work. So far it is as yet untitled. But I did it. I, uh, thought you should know. 

Here's a pie graph that I like to call, "Why I Didn't Tell People (Like My Roommates) About This"

  

Robert Langellier

Natural Selection

Robert Langellier

You don’t need a red wire and a blue wire to experience a real instance of absolute panic. You don’t need a long silence after proposing to your girlfriend of three years. All you need is to have your teacher announce “choose your own partner” time in class.

At this point, starting guns fire in the distance, nervous pit stains appear, and the entire room plays a furiously faux-nonchalant game of musical chairs, except with eye contact and not chairs.

“Finding a partner” is one of the lesser appreciated terrors of the young student. There’s nothing scarier than the possibility of ending up with that weird girl with the greasy hair and the voice of a seal. This bodes dangerously for the normal kid sitting next to her. All eyes in the room will undoubtedly treat his corner of the room like a cluster of lepers. By indiscriminately making a sweeping rejection of an entire region, chances of being paired with Sealia are cut drastically. 

In most cases, everyone will have a preferred target. The Golden Partner. I try utilizing my eyes as a sound combination of mild heat vision and ESP telegraphing to control my target’s focus. If I succeed, he catches my eyes, and I quickly convert them into tractor beams that lock him in until it’s too late for him to escape. I have won, at least for that day.

Never let them see you bleed. Sweat, but never pant. Nobody wants a nervous kid for a partner or a friend. It’s a difficult process to put on an air of being above petty scramblings while a keeping a constant vigilance on a 270-degree region, but in times of real need, unknown potential always realizes itself. Your eyes will adapt to bend light around your temples like bullets in Wanted, and your senses will become attuned to the emotional statuses of both your friends and your enemies. The moment you show fear, the culture will sniff you out immediately. You are then doomed to a less-cool partner, or worse yet. 

Ostracization. If there are 185 penguins in an arctic colony, mathematically, one of them isn’t mating. I failed to mate with anyone in my 8am French class. Over the course of time, every person in class has paired off with an unofficial daily partner. I have been ostracized. Every day is a bleak window of terrifying solitude. My eyelids shift constantly between half-closed half-consciousness and wide-open, petrified fear. Since it is a foreign language class requiring you to speak, French makes room for “partner work” time every single day. And every single day, I try to sink lower into my chair than the day before, in shame.

I have one of three options when this happens. First, I look to see if anybody’s partner has failed to show up. Perhaps I can snatch them up like a Hungry Hungry Hippo marble. When this inevitably fails, I switch to option two: try to fit a third nut into a peanut shell. The way the tiny desks in my classroom are attached to the chairs and packed in, this becomes an exercise in extreme awkwardness, especially when you’ve built a reputation in class of not talking much or interacting with other life forms. I often then concede defeat and slip into option three: sit alone, stare intently at my book, and read the partner exercise to myself semi-audibly. This is true humiliation, coming to its full, awkward, disgusting climax when my French teacher came over a couple weeks ago, knelt down by my desk, and did the exercise with me. Consider myself blacklisted, unless a pity clause is soon invoked in some kind soul. It probably won’t be.

Selection is about speed, strategic angles, communication, and willingness to mouth the word “Sorry” to that one guy while pointing to the kid sitting next to you. Play the game wrong, and you’ll end up as alone as I am. Play the game right, and you might make a lasting friend with a real impact on your life. All it takes is a little luck. One wire makes all the difference.